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Feb 21, 2009

NXT-G 2.0 Datalogging

I've had the chance to have a good play around with the new education version of the software, in particular the datalogging aspect.

Whilst it's possible to do datalogging in previous versions (check out some of Brian's amazing posts) the new version ties it all together in a nice GUI that I think will appeal to many teachers.

Each experiment has it's own Configuration panel where you can specify the sampling rate, overall experiment length and the sensors you'll be using.

Once setup, you can run the experiment in either Real-time or remote mode. Real-time allows you to see the data as it's captured whereas remote allows you to download the experiment, take the NXT to another location and upload the data once the experiment is finished.

NXT-G2.0 produces some nice graphs and enables you to to do some basic analysis. This is the graph that was produced when I logged the light levels in a room for 24 hours.

Overall I really like it. It is quick to setup and run experiments and the data visualisation is quite nice. If you want to do more analysis you can export the data to a .csv file and open in Excel.

Here are a few more graphs I made.

NXT bouncing on a rubber band, with the Ultrasonic Sensor measuring the distance to the ground.

Temperature in a room over 24 hours

A cup of boiling water cooling normally(white) and after dropping in an icecube(orange)

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